HELENA
by Helenas-Sestra
Summary: An outcast at school and a victim at home, Helena has always been the underdog. But recently things have been happening- strange things. There's a power inside of her and it's only just beginning to awaken… AN ORPHAN BLACK AU OF THE NOVEL 'CARRIE' BY STEPHEN KING
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

 ** _News item from the Westover (Me.) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1987:_**

RAIN OF STONES REPORTED 

It was reliably reported by several people that a rain of stones fell from a clear blue sky on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th. The stones fell principally on the home of Mr. Tomas White, damaging the roof extensively and ruining two gutters and a downspout valued at approximately $200. Mr. White, a widow, lives with his three -year-old daughter, Helena. Mr. White could not be reached for comment.

x

Nobody was truly surprised when it happened, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow. On the surface, all of the girls in the shower room were shocked, thrilled, ashamed, or simply glad that the White freak had been taken down again. Some of them might also have claimed surprise, but of course their claim would have been false. Helena had been going to school with some of them since the first grade, and this had been building since that time, building slowly and quietly, in accordance with all the laws that govern human nature, building with all the steadiness of a chain reaction approaching the final blow.

What none of them knew at that time, of course, was that Helena White was telekinetic.

x

 ** _Graffiti scratched on a desk of the Barker Street Grammar School in Chamberlain:_**

Helena White eats shit.

x

The locker room was filled with shouts, echoes, and the calming sound of showers splashing on tiles. The girls had been playing soccer in Period One, and they were all eager to wash off the thin layer of morning sweat.

Girls stretched under the hot water, giggling, chatting amiably together as they shared the latest gossip of the day. Helena stood among them stoically, a frog among swans. She was a thin girl with dark circles under her eyes that never seemed to go away, no matter how much sleep she got, her pale blond hair, even wet, still lay in a curly tangled mess encompassing her head. It rested against her face with dispirited sogginess and she simply stood, head slightly bent, letting the water fall against her back and roll off. She looked the part of the odd duck, the constant butt of every joke, the last one chosen for sports teams and first one picked on by teachers, a complete outcast. And she was. She wished forlornly and constantly that Dyad High had individual -and consequently private- showers, like the high schools at Westover or Lewiston. They stared. They always stared.

Showers turning off one by one, girls stepping out, wrapping themselves in colourful towels, spraying perfume, checking the clock over the door. T-shirts were pulled over, jeans zipped shut. Steam hung in the air; misting over the mirrors and making the air hard to breathe. Girls shouted across the room to each other, jokes and yells bouncing off of the white walls.

Miss Hendrix, their energetic gym teacher, stepped in, craned her neck around briefly, and clapped her hands together once, smartly. "What are you waiting for, Helena? Doom? Bell in five minutes." Her pants were a blinding white, matching the stark white vest she had on over a pink sweater. A silver whistle, won in a college archery competition, hung around her neck.

The girls giggled and Helena looked up, her eyes slow and dazed from the heat and the steady, pounding roar of the water. "Ohuh?" It was a strangely froggy sound, catching in her throat for a second longer than it should have, and the girls giggled again. Sarah Manning had whipped a towel from her hair and began to comb rapidly. Miss Hendrix made an irritated cranking gesture at Helena and stepped out.

Helena turned off the shower. It died with a drip and a gurgle. It wasn't until she stepped out that they all saw the blood running down her leg.

x

 ** _From The Shadow Exploded: Documented Facts and Specific Conclusions Derived from the Case of Helena White, by David R. Congress (Tulane University Press: 2007), p. 34:_**

It can hardly be disputed that failure to note specific instances of telekinesis during the White girl's earlier years must be attributed to the conclusion offered by Clark and Stearns in their paper Telekinesis: A Wild Talent Revisited-that the ability to move objects by effort of the will alone, comes to the subject only in moments of extreme personal stress. The talent is well hidden indeed; how else could it have remained submerged for centuries with only a handful of cases ever being reported?

We have only weak evidence upon which to lay our foundation in this case, but even this is enough to indicate that a "TK" potential of immense magnitude existed within Helena White. The great tragedy is that we are now all only able to gain this knowledge long after the disaster has passed.

x

"Per-iod!"

The call came first from Rachel Duncan. It struck the tiled walls, rebounded, and struck again. Sarah Manning gasped and before she realized what she was doing a small laugh burst out of her felt an odd, confusing mixture of revulsion, exasperation, and pity. She just looked so dumb, standing there, not knowing what was going on. God, you'd think she's never had a-"PERIOD!"

It was becoming a chant, an incantation. Someone in the background (perhaps Rachel again, Sarah couldn't tell in the orchestra of sounds) was yelling, "Plug it up!

"PER-iod, PER-iod, PER-iod!"

Helena stood dumbly in the center of a forming circle, water rolling from her skin in beads. She was frozen, aware that the joke was on her (as always), embarrassed but unsurprised.

Sarah felt a welling sense of disgust as the first dark drops of blood struck the tile in dime-sized drops. "For God's sake, Helena, you've gotten your period!" she cried. "Clean yourself up!"

"Huh?"

She looked around, desperately searching for an escape. Her hair stuck to her cheeks in a curving helmet shape.

"She thinks they're for lipstick!" Aynsley Norris suddenly shouted with cruel glee, and then burst into a shriek of laughter. Sarah remembered the comment later and fitted it into a general picture, but now it was only another senseless sound in the confusion.

Sixteen? She was thinking. She must know what's happening, she-

x

More droplets of blood. Helena still blinked around at her classmates in slow bewilderment.

Charity Simms turned around and made mock throwing-up gestures.

"You're bleeding!" Sarah yelled suddenly, furiously. "You're bleeding, you meathead!"

Helena looked down at herself.

She shrieked.

The sound was very loud in the humid locker room.

A tampon suddenly struck her in the chest and fell with a plop at her feet. A red flower stained the absorbent cotton and spread.

Then the laughter, disgusted, contemptuous, horrified, seemed to rise and bloom into something jagged and ugly, and the girls were bombarding her with tampons and pads, some from purses, some from the broken dispenser on the wall. They flew like snow and the chant became: "Plug it up, plug it up, plug it up, plug it-"

x

Sarah was throwing them too, throwing and chanting with the rest, not really sure what she was doing -a charm had occurred to her mind and it glowed there like neon: There's no harm in it really no harm in it really no harm- It was still flashing and glowing, reassuringly, when Helena suddenly began to howl and back away, flailing her arms and sobbing loudly.

The girls stopped, realizing that the peak of the explosion had finally been reached. It was at this point, when looking back, that some of them would claim surprise. Yet there had been all these years, all these years of let's steal Helena's shoes at Christian Youth Camp and I found this love letter from Helena to Jesse let's take a picture and pass it around and hide her underpants somewhere and put this snake in her shoe and dunk her, dunk her again; Helena tagging along stubbornly on biking trips, known one year as psycho and the next year as bleach-head, always smelling sweaty, not able to catch up; catching poison ivy from peeing in the bushes and everyone finding out; Raj Singh putting peanut butter in her hair that time she fell asleep in study hall; the pinches, the legs outstretched in school aisles to trip her up, the books knocked from her desk, the obscene note tucked into her purse; Helena on the church picnic and kneeling down clumsily to pray and the seam of her old cotton skirt splitting along the zipper; Helena always missing the ball, even in kickball, falling on her face in Modern Dance during their sophomore year and chipping a tooth, running into the net during volleyball; always showing sweat stains under the arms of her blouses; even the time Rachel Duncan called up after school from Bobby's shop downtown and asked her if she knew that pig poop was spelled H-E-L-E-N-A: Suddenly after all this the blowing point was reached. The ultimate shit-on, gross-out, put- down, long searched for, was found. Boom.

She backed away, howling in the new silence, forearms crossing her face, a tampon stuck to her left foot.

The girls watched her, their eyes shining solemnly.

Helena backed into the side of one of the four large shower compartments and slowly collapsed into a sitting position. Slow, helpless groans jerked out of her. Her eyes widened, like the eyes of a deer trapped in the headlights of a car.

Sarah said slowly, hesitantly: "I think this must be the first time she ever-

That was when the door pumped open with a flat and hurried bang and Miss Hendrix burst in to see what the matter was.

x

 ** _From The Shadow Exploded (p. 41):_**

Both medical and psychological writers on the subject are in agreement that Helena White's exceptionally late and traumatic commencement of the menstrual cycle might as well have provided the trigger for her dormant talent.

It seems incredible that, as late as 2003, Helena knew nothing of the mature woman's monthly cycle. It is nearly as incredible to believe that the girl's father would permit his daughter to reach the age of nearly seventeen without consulting a gynecologist concerning the daughter's failure to menstruate.

Yet the facts are undeniable. When Helena White realized she was bleeding from the vaginal opening, she had no idea of what was taking place. She was innocent of the entire concept of menstruation.

One of her surviving classmates, Aynsley Norris, tells of entering the girls' locker room at Dyad High School the year before the events we are concerned with and seeing Helena using a tampon to blot her lipstick with. At that time Miss Norris said: "What the hell are you doing?"

Miss White replied: "Isn't this right?" Miss Norris then replied: "Sure. Sure it is."

Aynsley Norris let a number of her girl friends in on this, and if anyone tried in the future to inform Helena of the true purpose of what she was using to apply make up with, she apparently dismissed the explanation as an attempt to pull her leg. This was a facet of her life that she had become exceedingly wary of...

x

When the girls were gone to their Period Two classes and the bell had been silenced (several of them had slipped quietly out the back door before Miss Hendrix could begin to take names), she slowly approached the still sobbing girl sitting on the floor. She reached out a hand and placed it on Helena's shoulder. "Ok, Helena I need you to look at me. You need to calm down-"But this only caused the screams to intensify.

Looking around wildly as if for some respite, Miss Hendrix took a deep breath before bringing her hand down quickly and slapping Helena across the face.

Helena looked up at her dumbly, face still contorted and working.

"Miss H-Hen-"

"I'm- I'm sorry I had to do that, but I honestly have no idea what all that fuss was about. Now get up." Started Miss Hendrix "Get up and tend to yourself."

"I'm bleeding to death!" Helena screamed, and one blind, searching hand came up and clutched Miss Hendrix's white shorts. It left a bloody handprint.

"I ... you . . . The gym teacher's face contorted into a pucker of distaste, and she briskly pulled Helena, stumbling, to her feet. "Stop playing games and go clean yourself up!"

Helena stood swaying between the showers and the wall with its quarter tampon dispenser, slumped over, her arms dangling limply. Her eyes were shiny and blank.

"Now," Miss Hendrix said with hissing, deadly emphasis, you take one of those pads out... no, never mind the coin slot, it's broken anyway . . . take one and . . . damn it, will you do it! You act as if you never had a period before."

"Period?" Helena said.

Her expression of complete unbelief was too genuine, too full of hopeless horror, to be ignored or denied. A terrible and black foreknowledge grew in Alison Hendrix's mind. It was incredible, could not be.

"Helena?" she said now, much more gently. She advanced toward the girl. "Helena?"

Helena flinched away. At the same instant, a rack of softball bats in the corner fell over with a large, echoing bang. They rolled every which way, making Alison jump.

"Helena, is this your first period?"

But now that the thought had been admitted, she hardly had to ask. The blood was dark and flowing with terrible heaviness. Both of Helena's legs were smeared and splattered with it, as though she had waded through a river of blood.

"It hurts," Helena groaned. "My stomach . .

"That passes," Miss Hendrix said. Pity and self-shame met in her and mixed uneasily. "You have to ... uh, stop the flow of blood. You-"

There was a bright flash overhead, followed by a loud pop as a light bulb sizzled and went out. Miss Hendrix cried out in surprise, and it occurred to her

( _the whole damn place is falling in_ )

that this kind of thing always seemed to happen around Helena when she was upset, as if bad luck followed her every step. The thought was gone almost as quickly as it had come. She took one of the pads from the broken dispenser and unwrapped it.

"Look," she said. "Like this-"


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

 **From The Shadow Exploded (p. 54):**

Helena White's mother, Margaret White, gave birth to her daughter on March 15, 1981, under circumstances which can only be termed bizarre. In fact, an overview of the Helena White case leaves the careful student with one feeling dominating over all others: that Helena was the only issue of a family as odd as any that has ever been brought to popular attention.

At approximately 1:30 P.M. on September 21, the neighbors on Carlin Street began to hear screams from the White bungalow. The police, however, were not summoned to the scene until after 6:00 P.M. We are left with two unappetizing alternatives to explain this time lag: Either the White's neighbors on the street did not wish to become involved in a police investigation, or dislike for them had become so strong that they deliberately adopted a wait-and-see attitude.

When the police did arrive at 6:22 P.M. the screams had become irregular. Mrs. White was found dead in her bed upstairs, and Mr. White was nowhere to be seen. The investigating officer, Gavin Hardcastle, at first thought she had been the victim of an assault. The bed was drenched with blood, and a butcher's knife lay on the floor. It was only then that he heard the baby crying.

Following the noise down to a small closet on the main floor, he found her still partially wrapped in the placental membrane, laying on the floor beside Tomas White, who was bent in prayer. He had apparently cut the umbilical cord himself with the knife.

When asked why Mrs. White had not been brought to the hospital, Officer Hardcastle was met with a rather long speech concerning the sins of medicines and doctors and intercourse and birth. But the most astounding, and most relevant to this current section, was the idea that neither husband nor wife had truly believed she was with child. It staggers both belief and imagination to advance the hypothesis that both Tomas and Margaret White did not know she was pregnant, or even understand what the word entails, and recent scholars such as J. W. Bankson and George Fielding have made a more reasonable case for the idea that the concept, linked irrevocably in their minds with the "sin" of intercourse, had been blocked entirely. They may simply have refused to believe that such a thing could happen to her.

We have records of at least three letters to a friend in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that seem to prove conclusively that Mrs. White believed, from her fifth month on, that she had "a cancer of the womanly parts" and would soon leave her husband for heaven….

* * *

When Miss Hendrix led Helena up to the office fifteen minutes later, the halls were mercifully empty. Classes droned onward behind closed doors.

Helena's shrieks had finally ended, but she had continued to weep with a steady regularity. Alison had finally placed the pad herself, cleaned the girl up with wet paper towels, and gotten her back into her plain cotton dress.

She tried twice to explain the commonplace reality of periods, but Helena clapped her hands over her ears and continued to cry.

Dr. Leekie, the assistant principal, was out of his office in a flash when they entered. Rudy and Seth, two boys waiting for the lecture due to them for cutting French, stared at Helena from their chairs.

"Come in," Dr. Leekie said briskly. "Come right in." He glared over Alison's shoulder at the boys, who were staring at the bloody handprint on her shorts. "What are you looking at?"

"Blood," Rudy said, and smiled with a kind of vacuous surprise.

"Two detention periods," Leekie snapped. He glanced down at the bloody handprint and blinked.

He closed the door behind them and began searching through the top drawer of his filing cabinet for a school accident form.

"Are you all right, uh-"

"Helena," Alison supplied. "Helena White." Dr. Leekie had finally found the sheet he was looking for. There was a large coffee stain on it.

"You won't need that, Dr. Leekie."

"I suppose it was the trampoline. We just … I won't?"

"No. But I think Helena should be allowed to go home for the rest of the day. She's had a rather frightening experience." Her eyes flashed a signal which he caught but could not interpret.

"Yes, okay, if you say so. Good. Fine." Leekie crumpled the form back into the filing cabinet, slammed it shut with his thumb in the drawer, and grunted. He whirled gracefully to the door, yanked it open, glared at Rudy and Seth, and called: "Miss Bowers, could we have a dismissal slip here, please? Helena Wright."

"White," said Miss Hendrix.

"White," Leekie agreed.

Over on the bench Seth sniggered.

"You'll keep quiet, unless you'd prefer a week's detention!" Leekie said sharply. A blister was forming under his thumbnail. Hurt like hell. Helena's steady, monotonous weeping went on and on.

Miss Bowers brought the yellow dismissal slip and Leekie scrawled his initials on it with his silver pocket pen, wincing at the pressure on his wounded thumb.

"Do you need a ride, Hannah?" he asked. "We can call a guardian if you'd like."

She shook her head. Leekie looked over her head and at Miss Hendrix.

"I'm sure she'll be all right," she said. "Helena only has to go over to Carlin Street. The fresh air will do her good."

Leekie gave the girl the yellow slip. "You can go now, Hannah," he said magnanimously.

"That's not my name!" she screamed suddenly.

Leekie recoiled, and Miss Hendrix jumped as if struck from behind. The heavy ceramic paperweight sitting on Leekie's desk (a miniature globe) suddenly toppled to the rug, as if to take cover from the force of her scream. Shattered pottery pieces spread over the dark green rug

"Now, listen," Leekie said, trying to muster sternness. "I know you're upset, but that doesn't mean I'll stand for-"

"Please," Miss Hendrix said quietly.

Leekie blinked at her and then nodded curtly. He tried to project the image of a lovable father figure while performing the disciplinary functions that were his main job as Assistant Principal, but did not succeed very well. The administration (usually represented at potluck suppers, P.T.A. functions, and award ceremonies) usually termed him "lovable Leekie." The student body was more apt to term him "that crazy science jerk from the office." But, as few students such as Mark and Rudy spoke at P.T.A. functions or town meetings, the administration's view tended to remain intact.

Now lovable Leekie, still secretly nursing his jammed thumb, smiled at Helena and said, "Go along then if you like, Miss Wright. Or would you like to sit a spell and just collect yourself?"

"I'll go," she muttered, and swiped at her hair. She got up, then looked around at Miss Hendrix. Her eyes were wide open and dark with knowledge. "They laughed at me. Threw things. They've always laughed."

Alison could only look at her helplessly.

Helena left.

For a moment there was silence; Leekie and Alison watched her go. Then, with an awkward throat-clearing sound, Dr. Leekie knelt down carefully and began to sweep together the debris from the fallen paperweight.

"What was that all about?"

She sighed and looked at the drying maroon handprint on her shorts with distaste. "She got her period. Her first period. In the shower somehow."

Leekie cleared his throat again and his cheeks went pink. The sheet of paper he was sweeping with moved even faster. "Isn't she a bit, uh-"

"Old for her first? Yes. That's what made it so traumatic for her. Although I can't understand why her father …" The thought trailed off, forgotten for the moment. "I don't think I handled it very well, but I didn't understand what was going on. She thought she was bleeding to death."

He stared up sharply.

"I don't believe she knew there was such a thing as periods until half an hour ago."

"Hand me that little brush there, Miss Hendrix. Yes, that's it." She fished the little brush out of the sea of debris packed on top of his book shelf. He began to sweep his pile of shards onto the paper. "There's still going to be some for the vacuum cleaner, I guess. This deep pile is miserable. I thought I set that weight back on the desk further. Funny how things fall over." Dumping the pile in the garbage, he returned back to his desk. "It's hard for me to believe that a girl in this or any other high school could get through three years and still be alien, to the fact of menstruation, Miss Hendrix."

"It's even more difficult for me," she said. "But it's all I can think of to explain her reaction. And she's always been the odd one out."

"I've placed her, I think. White. Tomas White's daughter. Must be. That makes it a little easier to believe." He sat down behind his desk and smiled apologetically. "There's so many of them. After five years or so, they all start to merge into one group face. You call boys by their brother's names, that type of thing. It's hard."

"Of course it is."

"Wait until you've been at it for twenty years, like me," he said morosely, looking down at his blister. "You get kids that look familiar and find out you had their father the year you started teaching. Tomas White was before my time though, for which I am profoundly grateful. He told Mrs. Bicente, that the Lord was reserving a special burning seat in hell for her because she gave the kids an outline of Mr. Darwin's beliefs on evolution. He was suspended twice while he was here-once for beating a classmate with his bible. Legend has it that Tomas saw the classmate smoking a cigarette. Peculiar religious views. Very peculiar." His fatherly expression suddenly snapped down. "The other girls. Did they really laugh at her?"

"Worse. They were yelling and throwing tampons at her when I walked in. Throwing them like … like baseballs."

"Oh. Oh, dear." The last of the father figure disappeared. Dr. Leekie went scarlet. "You have names?"

"Yes. Not all of them, although some of them may rat on the rest. Rachel Duncan appeared to be the ringleader as usual."

"Rachel and her loyal followers," Leekie murmured.

"Yes. Aynsley Norris, Charity Simms, Meera Kumar, and Marcy Coates And Sarah Manning." She frowned. "You wouldn't expect a trick like that from Sarah. She's never seemed the type for this kind of a-a stunt."

"Did you talk to the girls involved?"

Miss Hendrix chuckled unhappily. "I got them the hell out of there. I was too flustered. And Helena was in hysterics."

"Um." He steepled his fingers. "Do you plan to talk to them?"

"I'll talk to them tomorrow," she promised, rising. "Rip them down one side and up the other."

"Good. Make the punishment suit the crime. And if you feel you have to send any of them to, ah, to me, feel free-"

"I will," she said kindly. "By the way, a light blew out while I was trying to calm her down. It added the final touch."

"I'll send a janitor right down," he promised. "And thanks for doing your best, Miss Hendrix. Will you have Miss Bowers send in Rudy and Seth?"

"Certainly." She left.

He leaned back and let the whole business slide out of his mind. When Rudy and Seth, class-cutters extraordinaire, slunk in, he glowered at them happily and prepared to talk tough.

As he often told Delphine Cormier, he ate class-cutters for lunch.

* * *

 **Graffiti scratched on a desk in Chamberlain Junior High School:**

Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, but Helena White eats shit.

* * *

She walked down Dyad Avenue and crossed over to Carlin at the stoplight on the corner. Her head was down and she was trying to think of nothing. Cramps came and went in great, gripping waves, making her slow down and speed up like a roller coaster, climbing up slowly before descending in a burst. She stared at the sidewalk. Quartz glittering in the cement. Hopscotch grids scratched in ghostly, rain-faded chalk. Wads of gum stamped flat. Pieces of tinfoil and candy wrappers. They all hate and they never stop. They never get tired of it. A penny lodged in a crack. She kicked it. Imagine Rachel Duncan all bloody and screaming for mercy. With rats crawling all over her face. Good. Good. That would be good. A roll of blackened caps that some kid had banged with a stone. Cigarette butts.

Crash in her head with a rock, with a boulder. Crash in all their heads.

Good. Good.

(saviour jesus meek and mild)

That was good for Tomas, all right for him. He didn't have to go among the wolves every day of every year, out into a sea of laughers, joke-tellers, pointers, snickerers. And didn't Tomas say there would be a Day of Judgment

(the name of that star shall be wormwood and they shall be scourged with scorpions)

and an angel with a sword? If only it would be today and Jesus would come not with a lamb and a shepherd's crook, but with a boulder in each hand to crush the laughers and the snickerers, to root out the evil and destroy it screaming-a terrible God of blood and righteousness.

And if only she could be His sword and His arm.

She had tried to fit in. She had defied Tomas in a hundred little ways, had tried to erase the red-plague circle that had been drawn around her from the first day she had left the small house on Carlin Street and had walked up to the Barker Street Grammar School with her Bible under her arm. She could still remember that day, the stares, and the sudden, awful silence when she had gotten down on her knees before lunch in the school cafeteria-the laughter had begun on that day and had echoed up through the years.

The red-plague circle was like blood itself-you could scrub and scrub and scrub and still it would be there, not erased, not clean. She had never gotten on her knees in a public place again, although she had not told Tomas that. Still, the original memory remained, with her and with them. She had fought Tomas tooth and nail over the Christian Youth Camp, and had earned the money to go herself by taking in sewing jobs. Tomas told her darkly that it was Sin, that it was Methodists and Baptists and Congregationalists and that it was Sin and Backsliding. He forbade Helena to swim at the camp. Yet although she had swum and had laughed when they dunked her

(until she couldn't get her breath any more and they kept doing it and she got panicky and began to scream)

and had tried to take part in the camp's activities, a thousand practical jokes had been played on stupid praying Helena and she had come home on the bus a week early, her eyes red and socketed from weeping, to be picked up by Tomas at the station, and Tomas had told her grimly that she should treasure the memory of her scourging as proof that Tomas knew, that Tomas was right, that the only hope of safety and salvation was inside the red circle. "For strait is the gate," he said grimly in the taxi, and at home he had sent Helena to the closet for six hours.

Tomas had, of course, forbade her to shower with the other girls; Helena had hidden her shower things in her school locker and had showered anyway, taking part in a naked ritual that was shameful and embarrassing to her in hopes that the circle around her might fade a little, just a little-

(but today oh today)

Tommy Erbter, age eight, was biking up the other side of the street. He was a small, intense -looking boy riding a bright red bike with dark blue training wheels. He was humming quietly to himself under his breath. When he saw Helena, he brightened, and stuck out his tongue.

"Hey, fart-face! Crazy prayin' Helena!"

Helena glared at him with sudden smoking rage. The bike wobbled on its training wheels and suddenly fell over. Tommy screamed. Helena smiled and walked on. The sound of Tommy's wails was sweet, jangling music in her ears.

If only she could make something like that happen whenever she liked.

( I just did)

She stopped dead seven houses up from her own, staring blankly at nothing. Behind her, Tommy was climbing tearfully back onto his bike, nursing a scraped knee. He yelled something at her, but she ignored it. She had been yelled at by experts.

She had been thinking:

(fall off that bike kid push, you off that bike and split your rotten head)

and something had happened.

Her mind had … had … she groped for a word. Had flexed. That was not just right, but it was very close. There had been a curious mental bending, almost like an elbow lifting a weight. That wasn't exactly right either, but it was all she could think of. An elbow with no strength. A weak baby muscle.

Flex.

She suddenly stared fiercely at Mrs. Chen's large living room window.

She thought:

(stupid mean old lady, break that window)

Nothing. Mrs. Chen's picture window glittered serenely in the fresh glow of morning. Another cramp gripped Helena's belly and she walked on.

But …

The light. And the paperweight; don't forget the paperweight.

She looked back

(ungodly woman, always complaining about my father)

over her shoulder. Again it seemed that something flexed … but very weakly. The flow of her thoughts shuddered as if there had been a sudden bubbling from a well deeper inside her. The picture window seemed to ripple. Nothing more. It could have been her eyes. Could have been.

Her head began to feel tired and fuzzy, and it throbbed with the beginning of a headache. Her eyes were hot, as if she had just sat down and read the Book of Revelations straight through.

She continued to walk down the street toward the small white house with the blue shutters. The familiar hate-love -dread feeling was churning inside her. Ivy had crawled up the west side of the bungalow

(they always called it the bungalow because the White house sounded like a political joke and Tomas said all politicians were crooks and sinners)

and the ivy was picturesque, she knew it was, but sometimes she hated it. Sometimes, like now, the ivy looked like a grotesque giant hand ridged with thick veins which had sprung up out of the ground to grip the building. She approached it with dragging feet.

Of course, there had been the stones.

She stopped again, blinking emptily at the day. The stones. Tomas never talked about that; Helena didn't even know if her father still remembered the day of the stones. It was surprising that she herself still remembered it. She had been a very little girl then. How old? Three? Four? There had been that girl in the white bathing suit, and then the stones came. And things had flown in the house. Here the memory was, suddenly bright and clear. As if it had been here all along, just below the surface, waiting for a kind of mental puberty.

Waiting, maybe, for today.


	3. Chapter 3

Warnings: Abuse, Self Harm (Nothing Graphic)

 **Chapter 3**

**From Helena: The Black Dawn of T.K. (Esquire magazine, September 12, 2010) by Jack Gaver:**

Beth Childs has lived in the neat San Diego suburb of Parrish for twelve years, and outwardly she appears the typical business woman. She wears high quality clothes in various muted shades; and her hair is straight and dark. But Ms. Childs still carries the heavy weight of her past in Chamberlain, and when she talks of Helena White her face takes on an odd, pinched look that is more like barely masked pain than the cool collected woman who introduced herself to me.

"Of course she was strange," Beth tells me as she stirs a packet of cream into her coffee. "The whole family was strange. Tomas worked out at the docks, and people on the street said he carried a Bible and a revolver to work with him every day. The Bible was for his coffee break and lunch. The gun was in case he met the Antichrist on the job. I can remember the Bible myself. The revolver … who knows? He was a big intimidating man with his hair was balding and beginning to turn grey. He always looked mean. And you didn't meet his eyes, not ever. They were so intense they actually seemed to glow. When you saw him coming you crossed the street and hoped he didn't notice you. "

She pauses, taking a deep sip out of her still steaming mug. Elizabeth Childs lived on Carlin Street until she was twenty, commuting to day classes at Lewin Business College in Motton. But she remembers the incident of the stones very clearly.

"There are times," she says, "when I wonder if I might have caused it. Their back yard was next to ours, and Tomas had put in a hedge but it hadn't grown out yet. We'd recently had a hot tub put in and the view from the White's kitchen window pointed directly at it. Tomas had called my mother dozens of times about 'the show' I was putting on in my back yard. Well, my bathing suit was perfectly decent-prudish by today's standards-nothing but a plain old blue one-piece. He used to go on and on about what a scandal it was for 'his baby.' My mother … well, she tries to be polite, but her temper was so quick. I don't know what he said to finally push her over the edge-called me the Whore of Babylon or some shit, I suppose -but my mother told Tomas that our yard was our yard and I'd go out and swim naked if that was her pleasure and mine. She also told him that he was a dirty old man with a can of worms for a mind. There was a lot more shouting, but you get the gist of it.

"I wanted to stop swimming right then. I hate trouble. I've never been particularly good with handling trouble, and Tomas was beginning to stress me out. But Mom-when she gets her mind set on something, she's a terror. She came home from the Bay with a little white bikini. Told me I might as well get all the sun I could. 'After all,' she said, 'the privacy of our own back yard and all.'"

Beth smiles a little at the memory and stands up to go refill her cup.

"I tried to argue with her, tell her I didn't want any more trouble, didn't want to be a pawn in their back-fence war. Didn't do a bit of good. Trying to stop my mom when she gets an idea is like trying to stop the sun from rising. Actually, there was more to it. I was scared of the Whites. Real religious nuts are nothing to fool with.

"But there I was on Saturday afternoon, spread out on a blanket in the back yard, covered with suntan lotion and listening to the radio. Mom hated me blasting my music and usually she'd yell out at least twice for me to turn it down before she went nuts. But that day she turned it up twice herself. I started to feel like the Whore of Babylon myself.

"But nobody came out of the Whites' place. I started to relax. I guess I was thinking Tomas must have taken Helena to the park to worship God in the raw or something. Anyway, after a little while I rolled on my back, put an arm over my eyes to block out the sun, and dozed off.

"When I woke up, Helena was standing next to me and looking down at my body."

She breaks off, frowning into space. Outside, the cars are whizzing by endlessly. I can hear the steady little whine my tape recorder makes. But it all seems a little too brittle, too glossy, just a cheap cover over a darker world-a real world where nightmares happen.

"She was such a pretty girl," Beth resumes, absent mindedly stirring her coffee. "I've seen some high school pictures of her, and that horrible fuzzy black-and-white photo on the cover of TIME. I look at them and all I can think is, Dear God, where did she go? What did that man do to her? Then I feel sick and sorry. She was so pretty, with pink cheeks and bright brown eyes, and her hair that light shade of blonde falling around her head in little ringlets. Sweet is the only word that fits. Sweet and bright and innocent. Her father's sickness hadn't touched her very deeply, not then.

"I kind of started up awake and tried to smile. It was hard to think what to do. I was drowsy from the sun and my mind felt sticky and slow. I said 'Hi.' She was wearing a little yellow dress, sort of cute but awfully long for a little girl in the summer. It came down to her ankles.

"She didn't smile back. She just pointed and said, 'What are those?'

"I looked down and saw that my top had slipped while I was asleep. So I fixed it and said, 'Those are my breasts, Helena.'

"Then she said-very solemnly: 'I wish I had some.'

"I said: 'You have to wait, Helena. You won't start to get them for another . ..oh, eight or nine years.

'"No, I won't,' she said. 'Tomas says good girls don't.' She looked strange for a little girl, half sad and half self-righteous.

"I could hardly believe it, and the first thing that popped into my mind also popped right out my mouth. I said: 'Well, I'm a good girl. And wouldn't your mother have had breasts?'

"She lowered her head and said something so softly I couldn't hear it. When I asked her to repeat it, she looked at me defiantly and said that her mother had been bad when she made her and that was why she had them. She called them dirty pillows, as if it was all one word.

"I couldn't believe it. I was just dumbfounded. There was nothing at all I could think to say. We just stared at each other, and what I wanted to do was grab that sad little scrap of a girl and hide her away from that psychopath of a father.

"And that was when Tomas came out of his back door and saw us.

"For a minute he just stared as if he couldn't believe it. Then he opened his mouth and yelled. His face was scrunched up into an image of rage. Complete, insane rage.

"I thought Helena was going to faint-or die on the spot. She sucked in all her breath and that little face went a cottage-cheesy color.

"Her father yelled: 'HELENA! '

"I jumped up and yelled back: 'Don't you dare yell at her! You make me sick…' Something stupid like that. I don't remember.

Helena started to go back and then she stopped and then she started again, and just before she crossed over from our lawn to theirs she looked back at me and there was a look … oh, it was dreadful. I can't say it. Wanting and hating and fearing … and misery. As if life itself had

fallen on her like stones, all at the age of three.

"My mother came out on the back stoop and her face just crumpled when she saw the child. And Tomas … oh, he was screaming things about sluts and strumpets and the sins of the fathers being visited even unto the seventh generation. My tongue felt like a little dried-up plant.

"For just a second Helena stood swaying back and forth between the two yards, and then Tomas looked up ward and I swear to god that man yelled at the sky. And then he started to … to hurt himself, scourge himself. He was clawing at his neck and cheeks, making red marks and scratches.

"Helena screamed out 'Tomas!' and ran to him.

"Then he kind of. . . squatted, like a frog, and his arms swooped wide open. I thought he was going to crush her and I screamed. The man was grinning. Grinning and glaring right at me over his daughter's shoulder. Oh, I was sick. Jesus, I was so sick.

"He gathered her up and they went in. I turned off my radio and I could hear them. Some of the words, but not all. You didn't have to hear all the words to know what was going on. Praying and sobbing and screeching. Crazy sounds. And Tomas telling the little girl to get herself into her closet and pray. The little girl crying and screaming that she was sorry, she forgot. Then nothing. And my mother and I just looked at each other. I never saw Mom look so bad, not even when Dad died. She said: 'The child-' and that was all. We went inside."

She gets up and goes to the window, a pretty woman in a dark grey dress. "It's almost like living it all over again, you know," she says, not turning around. "I'm all riled up inside again, the anger's still there even after all these years" She laughs a little and cradles her elbows in her palms.

"Oh, she was so pretty. You'd never know from those pictures.

Cars go by outside, back and forth, and I sit and wait for her to go on.

"My mother brewed us some tea, strong, with milk, the way she used to when I was a kid and someone had pushed me into the nettle patch or I'd fallen off my bicycle. It was awful but we drank it anyway, sitting across from each other in the kitchen nook. She was in some old housedress with the hem falling down in back, and I was in my Whore of Babylon two-piece swimsuit. I wanted to cry but it was too real to cry about, not like the movies.

"I wanted to ask my mother if we should maybe go over there, at least try to do something, and I was just opening my mouth to say it when the other thing happened … the thing you want to hear about, I guess. There was a big thump outside that made the glasses rattle in the china cabinet. It was a feeling as well as a sound, thick and solid, as if someone had just pushed an iron safe off the roof."

"I went to the window and looked out, but I couldn't see anything. Then, when I was getting ready to turn around, something else fell. The sun glittered on it. I thought it was a big glass globe for a second. Then it hit the edge of the Whites' roof and shattered, and it wasn't glass at all. It was a big chunk of ice. I was going to turn around and tell Mom, and that's when they started to fall all at once, in a shower.

"They were falling on the Whites' roof, on the back and front lawn, on the outside door to their cellar. That was a sunroom with a thin metal roof, and when the first one hit it made a huge echoing noise, like a church bell. My mother and I both screamed. We were clutching each other like a couple of girls in a thunderstorm.

"Then it stopped. There was no sound at all from their house. You could see the water from the melting ice trickling down their slate shingles in the sunshine. A great big hunk of ice was stuck in the angle of the roof and their little chimney. The light on it was so bright that my eyes hurt to look at it.

"My mother started to ask me if it was over, and then Tomas screamed. The sound came to us very clearly. In a way it was worse than before, because there was terror in this one. Then there were clanging, banging sounds, as if he was throwing every pot and pan in the house at the girl.

"The back door slammed open and slammed closed. No one came out. More screams. Mom said for me to call the police but I couldn't move. I was stuck to the spot. Mr. Kirk and his wife Virginia came out on their lawn to look. The Smiths, too. Pretty soon everyone on the street that was home had come out, even old Mrs. Warwick from up the block, and she was deaf in one ear.

'Things started to crash and tinkle and break. Bottles, glasses, I don't know what all. And then the side window broke open and the kitchen table fell halfway through. It was a big mahogany thing and it took the screen with it and it must have weighed three hundred pounds. How could a person-even a big man like Tomas-throw that?" I ask her if she is implying something.

"I'm only telling you," she insists, suddenly distraught. "I'm not asking you to believe-"

She seems to catch her breath and then goes on flatly: "There was nothing for maybe five minutes. Water was dripping out of the gutters over there. And there was ice all over the Whites' lawn. It was melting fast."

She gives a short, chopping laugh and takes a deep sip out of her cup.

"Why not? It was August."

She wanders aimlessly back toward the sofa, then veers away. "Then the stones. Right out of the blue. Whistling and screaming like bombs. My mother cried out, 'What, in the name of God!' and put her hands over her head. But I couldn't move. I watched it all and I couldn't move. It didn't matter anyway. They only fell on the Whites' property.

"One of them hit a downspout and knocked it onto the lawn. Others punched holes right through the roof and into the attic. The roof made a big cracking sound each time one hit, and puffs of dust would squirt up.

The ones that hit the ground made everything vibrate. You could feel them hitting in your feet.

"Our china was tinkling and the fancy Welsh dresser was shaking and Mom's teacup fell on the floor and broke.

"They made big pits in the Whites' back lawn when they struck. Craters. Tomas hired a junkman from across town to cart them away, and Jerry Smith from up the street paid him a buck to let him chip a piece off one. He took it to B.U. and they looked at it and said it was ordinary granite.

"One of the last ones hit a little table they had in their back yard and smashed it to pieces.

"But nothing, nothing that wasn't on their property was hit."

She stops and turns from the window to look at me, and her face is haggard from remembering all that. One hand plays forgetfully with her casually stylish haircut. "Not much of it got into the local paper. By the time Billy Harris came around-he reported the Chamberlain news- he had already gotten the roof fixed, and when people told him the stones had gone right through it, I think he thought we were all pulling his leg.

"Nobody wants to believe it, not even now. You and all the people who'll read what you write will wish they could laugh it off and call me just another nut who's been out here in the sun too long. But it happened. There were lots of people on the block who saw it happen. And now there's this other thing. No one can laugh that off, either. Too many people are dead.

"And it's not just on the White's property anymore."

She smiles, but there's not a drop of humor in it. She says: "Margaret White was insured, and Tomas got a lot of money when she died… double indemnity. The house was insured too, but he never got a penny of that. The damage was caused by an act of God. Poetic justice, huh?"

She laughs a little, but there's no humor in that, either. .


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

 **Found written repeatedly on one page of a Dyad High School notebook owned by Helena White:**

"Everybody's guessed/that baby can't be blessed/'til she finally sees that she's like all the rest. …"

* * *

Helena went into the house and closed the door behind her. Bright daylight disappeared and was replaced by brown shadows, coolness, and the oppressive smell of talcum powder. The only sound was the ticking of the dark wooden cuckoo clock in the living room.

She walked up the hall and put her coat in the closet. A luminous picture above the coat hooks limned a ghostly Jesus hovering grimly over a family seated at the kitchen table. Beneath was the caption (also lit up): The Unseen Guest.

She went into the living room and stood in the middle of the faded, starting-to-be-threadbare rug. She closed her eyes and watched the little dots flash by in the darkness. Her headache thumped queasily behind her temples.

Tomas worked lifting boxes out in the docks all the way at the edge of the town. He had worked there since Helena was five, when the compensation and insurance that had come from her mother's death had begun to run out. His hours were from seven-thirty in the morning until four in the afternoon. The work was Godless. Tomas had told her so many times

She opened her eyes. The living room contained two chairs with straight backs. There was a sewing table with a light where Helena sometimes made dresses in the evening while Tomas read his bibleand talked about The Coming. The cuckoo clock was on the far wall.

There were many religious pictures, but the one Helena liked best was on the wall above her chair. It was Jesus leading lambs on a hill that was as green and smooth as the Riverside golf course. The others were not as tranquil: Jesus turning the moneychangers from the temple, Moses throwing the Tablets down upon the worshipers of the golden calf, Thomas the doubter putting his hand in Christ's wounded side (oh, the horrified fascination of that one and the nightmares it had given her as a girl), Noah's ark floating above the agonized, drowning sinners, Lot and his family fleeing the great burning of Sodom and Gomorrah.

On a small side table there were a lamp and a stack of tracts. The top pamphlet showed a sinner (his spiritual status was obvious from the agonized expression on his face) trying to crawl beneath a large boulder. The title blared: Neither shall the rock hide him ON THAT DAY!

But the room was actually dominated by a huge plaster crucifix on the far wall, fully four feet high. Tomas had mail-ordered it special from St. Louis. The Jesus impaled upon it was frozen in a grotesque, muscle- straining rictus of pain, mouth drawn down in a groaning curve. His crown of thorns bled scarlet streams down temples and forehead. The eyes were turned up in a medieval expression of slanted agony. Both hands were also drenched with blood and the feet were nailed to a small plaster platform. This corpus had also given Helena endless nightmares in which the mutilated Christ chased her through dream corridors, holding a mallet and nails, begging her to take up her cross and follow Him.

The pain in her legs and belly and privates had drained away a little. She no longer thought she was bleeding to death. The word was menstruation, and all at once it seemed logical and inevitable. It was her Time of the Month. She giggled a strange, soft giggle in the solemn stillness of the living room. It sounded like a quiz show. You too can win an all-expenses-paid trip to Bermuda on Time of the Month. Like the memory of the stones, the knowledge of menstruation seemed always to have been there, blocked but waiting. She turned and walked heavily upstairs. The bathroom had a wooden floor that had been scrubbed nearly white (Cleanliness is next to Godliness) and a tub on claw feet. Rust stains dripped down the porcelain below the chrome spout, and there was no shower attachment. Tomas said showers were sinful.

Helena went in, opened the towel cabinet, and began to hunt purposefully but carefully, not leaving anything out of place. Tomas' eyes were sharp.

The old blue box was in the very back, left behind from a time when her mother was still alive. There was a fuzzily silhouetted woman in a long, filmy gown on the side. She took one of the tampons out and looked at it curiously. She had blotted the lipstick she snuck into her purse quite openly with these- once on a street corner. Now she remembered (or imagined she did) quizzical, shocked looks. Her face flamed. They had told her. The flush faded to a milky anger.

She went into her tiny bedroom. There were many more religious pictures here, but there were more lambs and fewer scenes of righteous wrath. A Dyad pennant was tacked over her dresser. On the dresser itself was a Bible and a plastic Jesus that glowed in the dark.

She undressed letting her thick woolen dress fall to the floor around her feet. She looked at the pile of heavy clothes, their buttons and rubber, with an expression of fierce wretchedness. In the school library there was a stack of old issues of Seventeen and often she leafed through them, pasting an expression of forced casualness on her face. The models looked so easy and smooth in their short, kicky skirts, bras, and frilly underwear with patterns on them. Of course easy was one of Tomas' pet words (she knew what Tomas would say oh no question) to describe them. And it would make her dreadfully self-conscious, she knew that. Naked, evil, blackened with the sin of exhibitionism, the breeze blowing lewdly up the backs of her legs, inciting lust. And she knew that they would know how she felt. They always did. They would embarrass her somehow, push her savagely back down into clowndom.

It was their way.

She could, she knew she could be

(what)

in another place. She was short, but not so short that all the other girls loomed over her. And she thought her legs were actually pretty, almost as pretty as Sarah's or Cosima's. She could be

(what oh what oh what)

She could get more sleep, maybe even put on some makeup, and the hollows under her eyes might not look so red. She could fix her hair. Buy clips and headbands to hold her curls down. Make little skirts and dresses that looked just like all the other kids'. The price of a bus ticket, a train ticket. She could be, could be, could be-

Alive.

She unsnapped her heavy cotton bra and let it fall to the ground. Pulling her underpants down, she saw that they were spotted with blood.

The pad Miss Hendrix had fixed was already wilting and she changed it carefully, knowing how bad she was, how bad they were, how she hated them and herself. Only Tomas was good. Tomas had battled the Black Man and had vanquished him. Helena had seen it happen in a dream. Tomas had driven him out of the front door, and the Black Man had fled up Carlin Street into the night, his cloven feet striking red sparks from the cement.

Tomas had torn the darkness out of himself and was pure.

Helena hated him.

She caught a glimpse of her own face in the tiny mirror she had hung on the back of the door, a mirror with a cheap green plastic rim, good only for combing hair by.

She hated her face, her dull, stupid, pale face, the vapid eyes, and the dark circles that always seemed to surround them. She hated her face most of all.

The reflection was suddenly split by a jagged, silvery crack. The mirror fell on the floor and shattered at her feet, leaving only the plastic ring to stare at her like a blinded eye.

* * *

 **From Ogilvie's Dictionary of Psychic Phenomena:**

Telekinesis is the ability to move objects or to cause changes in objects by force of the mind. The phenomenon has most reliably been reported in times of crisis or in stress situations, when automobiles have been levitated from pinned bodies or debris from collapsed buildings, etc.

The phenomenon is often confused with the work of poltergeists, which are playful spirits. It should be noted that poltergeists are astral beings of questionable reality, while telekinesis is thought to be an empiric function of the mind, possibly electrochemical in nature…

* * *

After they had finished making love, as she slowly put her clothes in order in the back seat of Cal Morrison's 1963 Ford, Sue Manning found her thoughts turning back to Helena White.

It was Friday night and Cal (who was looking pensively out the back window with his pants still down around his ankles; the effect was comic but oddly endearing) had taken her bowling. That, of course, was a mutually accepted excuse. Sex had been on their minds from the word go.

She had been going out more or less steadily with Cal ever since October (it was now May) and they had been lovers for only two weeks. Seven times, she amended. Tonight had been the seventh. There had been no fireworks yet, no bands bursting into song, but it had gotten a little better.

The first time had hurt like hell. Tonight was only the second time she had begun to feel something

like pleasure, and then it was over. Cal had held out for as long as he could, but then it was just … over. It seemed like an awful lot of rubbing for a little warmth.

In the aftermath she felt low and melancholy, and her thoughts turned to Helena. A wave of remorse caught her with all emotional guards down, and when Cal turned back from the view of Brickyard Hill, she was crying.

"Hey," he said, alarmed. "Oh, hey." He held her clumsily.

'"S all right," she said, still weeping. "It's not you. I did a not-so- good thing today. I was just thinking of it."

"What?" He patted the back of her neck gently.

So she found herself launching into the story of that morning's incident, hardly believing it was herself she was listening to. Facing the thing frankly, she realized the main reason she had allowed Cal to have her was because she was in

(love? infatuation? didn't matter results were the same)

with him, and now to put herself in this position-cohort in a nasty shower-room joke- was hardly the approved method to keep a guy. And Cal was, of course, Popular. As someone who had never cared about being Popular all her life, it had almost seemed impossible that she would meet and fall in love (?) with someone like Cal. They were almost certain to be voted King and Queen of the high school Spring Ball, (It only takes one popular person to make a popular couple) and the senior class had already voted them class couple for the yearbook. Sarah wasn't sure how she felt about her new found popularity, and originally she had planned to just continue her trend of ignoring a majority of her classmates.

But it hadn't taken her long to realize that the popularity had also come with something she had always longed for-a sense of place, of security, of status. And slowly, maybe even without her consciously knowing it, Sarah had begun to enjoy things she had never thought to notice before. The fact that she had a table full of friends to sit with at lunch, or that people would stop in the halls just to wave or exchange a greeting with her, She was quite sure

(or only hopeful)

that she wasn't that weak, not that easily lulled into the cookie cutter model of every other student at Dyad. But now there was this shower thing, where she had gone along and pitched in with high, savage glee. The word she was avoiding was expressed To Conform, in the infinitive, and it conjured up miserable images of hair in curlers, whispered words and cruel giggles, losing her black clothes and heavy eyeliner, having every inch of what made her Sarah erased until she was nothing more than a mindless clone.

Helena, it was that goddamned Helena, this was her fault.

She had already bought her prom gown. It was blue. It was beautiful. It was something she never would have worn a year ago.

"You're right," he said when she was done; "Bad news. Doesn't sound a bit like you." His face was grave and she felt a cool slice of terror. Then he smiled-he had a very cute smile-and the darkness retreated a bit.

"I kicked a kid in the stomach once when he was knocked out. Did I ever tell you about that?"

She shook her head.

"Yeah." He rubbed his nose reminiscently, "The kid's name was Danny Patrick. He beat the living shit out of me once when we were in the sixth grade. I hated him, but I was scared, too. I was waiting for him. You know how that is?"

She didn't, but nodded anyway.

"Anyway, he finally picked on the wrong kid a year or so later. Pete Taber. He was just a little guy, but he had lots of muscle. Danny got on him about something, I don't know, marbles or something, and finally Peter just rose up and beat the shit out of him. That was on the playground of the old Kennedy Junior High. Danny fell down and hit his head and went out cold. Everybody ran, we thought he might be dead. I ran away too, but first I gave him a good kick in the ribs. Felt really bad about it afterward. You going to apologize to her?"

It caught Sarah unprepared and all she could do was ask weakly:

"Did you?"

"Huh? Hell no! I had better things to do than spend my time in apologizing to bullies. But there's a big difference, Sarah."

"There is?"

"It's not seventh grade any more. And I had some kind of reason, even if it was a crappy one. What did that girl ever do to you?"

She didn't answer because she couldn't. She had never passed more than a hundred words with Helena in her whole life, and three dozen or so had come today. Phys Ed was the only class they'd had in common since they had graduated from Chamberlain Junior High.

A wave of self-hatred flashed through her stomach

She found she could not bear that and so she twisted it at him. "When did you start making all these big moral decisions? After you started fucking me?"

She saw the good humor fade from his face and was sorry.

"Guess I should have kept quiet," he said, and pulled up his pants.

"It's not you, it's me." She put a hand on his arm. "I'm ashamed, see?"

"I know," he said. "But I shouldn't be giving advice. I'm not very good at it."

"Cal, do you ever hate being so … well, Popular?"

"Me?" The question wrote surprise on his face. "Do you mean like football and class president and that stuff"

"Yah."

"No. It's not very important. High school isn't a very important place. When you're going you think it's a big deal, but when it's over nobody really thinks it was great unless they'redrunk. That's how my brother and his buddies are, anyway.

The night pressed dark against the slightly steamed car windows.

"I'll probably end up working at my dad's car lot," he said. "I'll spend my Friday and Saturday nights down at Uncle Billy's or out at The Cavalier drinking beer and talking about the Saturday afternoon I got that fat pitch from Saunders and we upset Dorchester. Get married to some local girl and always own last year's model, vote Democrat-"

"Don't," she said, her mouth suddenly full of a dark, sweet horror. She pulled him to her. "No more talking, I don't wanna think anymore."

So for the second time that night the pair lost themselves in each other and this time it was different, this time there finally seemed to be room and there was no tiresome rubbing but a delicious friction that went up and up.

Later, on the way home, he asked her formally if she would go to the Spring Ball with him. She said she would. He asked her if she had decided what to do about Helena. She said she hadn't. He said that it made no difference, but she thought that it did. It had begun to seem that it meant all the difference.


End file.
